London the third

I was in Notting Hill looking to go upside Hugh Grant's head when I suddenly realised that if I got hit by a bus the last thing I wrote would be about bacon, and while that would be fitting it's not how I want to go out, so I had to hurry back and amend my legacy.

I forgot to mention this, which I got free yesterday when I picked up my London Pass. I don't know who to give it to - you're all so deserving.

Where I walked this morning. The triangle bit at the top is where I went looking for the street where one of my mother's favourite writers lived. I found the street but realised I had no idea which number house it was. Heh. Still, the neighbourhood was lovely.

Gore gore gore!

I thought I'd be spotting these all over the place, but this is the first one I've come across. Look who it is, though! Also: The Dead Comics Society? Aren't all comics dead, at least on the inside?

Kensington Palace. Most happily situated. And mostly closed for renovation.

But I decided it was time to actually go into the inside of a touristy thing, so in I went. What parts of the palace are still open have been turned into the Kensington Palace experience, which was kind of, well, tacky, especially the part where an actor dressed as an old-fashioned maid came up and asked me if I'd seen a feral boy around. It could have been very authentic except she was wearing a battery-powered miner's lamp on her head. I wasn't sure what the deal with the feral boy was (all the information for the displays was written in poetry, which I did not have the patience for) but I told her she should enter him in the dog show for which I'd seen a poster and she pulled out a notebook and ballpoint pen to write that down. Whatever she was doing, it was probably all very relevant to the history of the palace, but alas, I'd crammed my clue-seeking-write-the-answers-and-uncover-the-mysteries booklet away as soon as it was handed to me. But it did come with a free pencil!

It was very attractively laid out and everything, but so staged. I was hoping it'd be set up like it was when people lived there, not full of ghost dresses and baby monitors emitting ghoulish wails and eerie recitations of correspondence. That is not to say I didn't enjoy myself. There was a lot of great artwork, although all the marble busts seemed to be of the same person, someone called Do Not Touch.

 Princess Margaret, Royal Skank. But in a good way! The next picture down was Diana, which everyone was crowding around, but she wasn't half so lovely as Margaret.

Whoa man. Kensington Church Road has hanging baskets of flowers on the lampposts, a nice touch without being too much. But this. Yikes. 

This is where you've been going wrong, Fi. Not enough Fs, and not enough musical welcomes. Hehe!

I went into Harrods on the way home, because it's what you do, you know. It was horrid. Insanely crowded, and surely, if you can afford luxury goods, wouldn't you prefer the luxury of shopping for them in more discreet premises? I stayed long enough to ride escalator up, save the life of a young boy whose shoelace had become stuck in the escalator (his father just left him, as if he thought serious injury was a fitting punishment for allowing a shoelace to become untied), and then ride the escalator down. Well, with one quick stop, because I got lost trying to get out:

Chocolate milk, and lemon. The lemon one has sparkly icing. If I throw up afterwards it's going to be reminiscent of that fountain in Wellington that we glitter-bombed that time.